I missed a spot.

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Several weeks ago… August 21 to be exact, I decided pressure washing the deck would be a good activity. I didn’t have time to do the whole thing but I figured I’d finish the next day and it’d be fine, right before vacation, and packing, and it was a bad plan.

I dismissed internal concerns that it’s a job that must be completed once started. A half pressure washed anything is glaring, which is why I don’t recommend trying it on stucco unless you have the week off.

For the past month I’ve been looking at my half-washed deck with side eye, avoiding restarting the project in case I had to stop again. A 2/3 pressure washed anything was the worst possible outcome I could imagine. So I deferred.

Turns out, a completely pressure washed deck where you happen to miss a spot is the worst possible outcome. It looks amazing; clean, usable, not embarrassing, except for that one spot that nobody will notice except me.

I’ll be staring at that spot every time I’m out there. I’ve considered putting a chair over it but that’s no good. I’ll know. Ideally I’ve considered taking the deck down entirely but that seems extreme. I could hook up the washer for one final round, but that also seems extreme in its unnecessaryness.

I accept that this is a problem only in my head. I accept that it’s not even that good a story. If I’m honest I’d hoped that by taking a picture and writing it down I’d get past whatever hang up I have and just go finish the job.

Instead, I’ve decided to take 2.5x longer than that to write about it.

I love having a blog again. Thanks for reading.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

Yogi Berra

My phone is really hard to use.

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I realized today as I was going through the finger jujitsu of finding my music app in between chat conversations and remote controlling the television that my phone is really hard to use.

It’s powerful, sure. I’m confident there are absurdly awesome comparisons of my iPhone 14’s capabilities to the total computing power of the U.S. Navy in 1972 or something. I should find one

Power, you might argue, means there’s capacity to add and manage lots of stuff in your phone, making the finger can-can necessary. You’d be right, but that’s beside the point.

Wait! Before you retort (you interrupt like a poorly timed Uber notification), you should also consider the relative size of everything in your phone were it a real thing, compared to the relatively small portal through which you’re interacting before you critique the clunky finger square-dance of app navigation. Again, right but irrelevant.

Are you finished…? Let me help.

– The design challenge inherent in making something this complex simple is staggering? Sure.

– You could have less on your phone and thus have a simpler experience? Ok, to a degree.

Those are all beside the point. The interface is hard to use. And we (I) accept that and the subsequent burden on my cognition and joints in order to fully utilize and, presumably enjoy my phone.

But, like kerning or alcoholism, once you see it, it becomes impossible to unsee. I find myself increasingly angry at the designers and builder of things on my phone.

The fact is, I often think of my phone as a large-ish room full of all these things. In my imagination I interact with them through a seriously adept but super-awkward robot arm with which I sort and rearrange and so forth. I find that I do a lot of phone cleanup in these moments—deleting apps and wondering why I even use this as much as I do.

Brains are weird, their ability to adapt to complexity and make it seem normal (let alone simple) is astounding.

Fundamentally, my phone is hard to use. I’m just good at it. It’s strange what we are willing to normalize.

A wizard should know better.

Treebeard

A country road. A tree. Evening.

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When I started high school I didn’t have a strong connection to the world. It manifested in lots of time I don’t remember, wandering trails or playing guitar in my room. I wasn’t particularly abnormal in that regard but I was fairly disconnected.

On a particular almost fall day, instead of going home, I wandered into the theatre to poke around. From the moment I was greeted (instantly), to being put to work (also, instantly), to the connections I made that would ultimately define my trajectory into adulthood (pretty much instantly), it was probably one of the biggest life-changing decisions I’ve ever made.

I bring it up for a reason I will share now, and one I just realized that I MIGHT share later.

With the weather stuck in almost fall mode, and my work, particularly Capption, sitting at almost taking-off, and my family transitioning to a new paradigm, almost college, I find myself mumbling lines from the play that I heard a hundred times, thirty-five years ago. Lines I hadn’t read since until today, but somehow still remember.

I’ve been feeling stuck since vacation. Incapable of moving forward consciously but ironically, progressing almost everywhere. If I weren’t waiting for something which is currently unclear to me, I would look at the last several weeks with satisfaction, noting positive direction in almost all things.

But I don’t feel it. Like the cooler air that’s still humid and static, I feel like I’m fall in a summer suit, trying to establish a new baseline from which to measure myself but unsuccessful simply because I’m waiting for something to orient against.

Nothing to be done? Maybe.

I’ve been in these head-spaces before. I see a lot of the notes I’ve left for myself in previous visits, offering direction, solace, patience, and the occasional heavy bag to work out the stress. I know that I know the process. I know that I’ll find my way through, yet again. By every measure I’m better equipped for the journey of waiting.

I know already that Godot doesn’t appear.

Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed.

Samuel Beckett (Vladimir)

The Midas touch, maybe.

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This place has moments that should be considered magic, except that they seem to happen frequently. Does that make them less magic being common?

They’re not identical in their magic-ness, but do tend toward similarity over the decades of years I’ve been coming here. if asked to remember a specific moment in a specific year I would hesitate. Shown a photo of that moment I could say with authority “that happened, 100%, final answer.”

Take this sunset. Maybe five total minutes of rose gold light filling the sky over a lake I’ve stared at for a thousand hours in my life. Odds are I’ve seen something like this fifty times before. God willing, I’ll see a few more. Still magic? I vote yes.

It could be that I need magic right now thus it appears. I’m willing to accept a universe that acts that way, though I would have questions. Maybe I’m simply opening the door in case magic chooses to stop by and say hello. Again, cool. It’s also possibly that magic simply lives here and waits patiently for me to notice.

My training tells me this is actually the answer. In that case, I’m glad I was here for it.


There is no greater weakness than stubbornness. If you cannot yield, if you cannot learn that there must be compromise in life—you lose.

Maxwell Maltz

Too windy to go boating?

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Someone close to my family committed suicide Saturday morning. I don’t know how to process this fact.

We were close a long time ago. We haven’t spoken in a decade or more. He was an implicit constant in my life—I simply didn’t think about him. Now he’s an explicit and permanent constant—forever etched into the stream of moments and memories.

So here I sit in a place I hold most sacred, surrounded by the clan that I hold most dear, and I keep glitching out because I don’t know how to process this fact.

Fuck you.

That’s what you get from me today.

Fuck you for staining these things.

How can I even consider starting to heal when I don’t know the damage yet. The blast is still forming and the shrapnel has not taken flight.

Someday I’ll get through all the serenity and understanding forgiveness and restoration that comes from time.

But not today.

Fuck You.

Me

The big helmets are back at the Mall.

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My weeks are completely screwed up, which happens every several years due to whatever happens to the calendar that brings my annual cabin trip into the week adjacent to Labor Day weekend (week 35) as opposed to the week it normally occupies in the calendar (week 34). Or maybe Labor Day moves and I’m always on vacation in week 35. Whatever the reason, it’s throwing me off.

There are several things that happen in the week we are on vacation that I’m used to processing from the comfort of a cabin

  1. Lakeville North High School schedules are released so my son spends the day texting his friends to collaborate/commiserate.
  2. There’s a gap week between the cabin trip and the start of school.
  3. The weather is hot and humid but fall arrives just as we are leaving the cabin.
  4. The state fair kicks off as we are heading home.
  5. Football makes an appearance sometime while we are gone so we leave in not-football time and return home in yes-football time.
  6. It’s still August so the year isn’t almost over yet.

1 and 3 are net positive changes and easily handled. Elijah has spent quality time with his friends and fall-like weather at the cabin is like winning the lottery.

2 and 6 feel like a scam for Elijah and me respectively due to the shift. Vacation will turn into school rules and homework too quickly for him, and September is basically Halloween making Thanksgiving plans to buy Christmas presents. It’s practically next year.

4 is hard to measure. I don’t go to the state fair but people do and that changes traffic. We will see.

5. That’s the actual problem. I’m not a football fan or watcher though I do keep up to make conversation. Years of being a Huskers / Oilers / Steelers fan before climate change and expanded league schedules taught me that football is part of the fall when it’s cold. This is clearly no longer true.

Even if you combine 5 and 3 by giving me a cold weekend at the cabin with football starting, it’s still wrong because the mall got the big helmets out so it’s football in the humidity.

I’m not sure when the calendar course-corrects but I look forward to things going back to their proper order, just in time for Elijah to start college… likely during cabin week.

Happy vacation to me!

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a bananas.

Groucho Marx

I listen to Don Henley radio now.

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Aging is weird. It seems like yesterday every part of me was elastic, flexible, resilient. Now getting out of bed wrong can be a day limiting event.

I’m mostly ok with it. It mostly has more rewards than drawbacks. And truthfully, the gestation period for aging is long enough for me to come to terms with any particular change as long as I do the daily work of processing.

But some days the processing includes all the stages of grief but particularly denial. That and bargaining. I bargain a lot with my aging.

So when I open Spotify on any random day and find myself listening to Phil Collins, Glenn Frey, Genesis, Toto — the “Don Henley Radio” mix — I try not to think about it as the loss of my musical elasticity, of which I have some but much less than I did.

I chalk it up to acceptance of aging. And I am content.

A volunteer tree.

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One of my current side quests is to reforest as much of our 0.4x acre lot as I can. Once you factor a house, driveway, etc, there’s not a ton of space left but we’ve managed to plant a fair few.

I’ll be introducing them to you over time, probably on days when I can’t think of anything else to write about. Today, meet our favorite maple volunteer.

This tree started as a weed in the back of the grove, discovered the spring of 2018 after we put up our fence. Here is a picture of it not existing yet inside the fence in November of 2017.

There’s no maple there yet.

What’s amazing to me about this tree is how freaking big it got in seven years. That seems extraordinary to me by any standard. We’ve done a little encouraging over the years to help it grow. Mostly pruning lower branches and saying nice things to it. Still, that bugger is big enough that I’d have to cross the street to fit it all in frame.

So why am I sharing this tree? That’s an excellent question with a moderately ok answer…

I love that THIS tree exists, and I want it to have a place among the river of documented human awareness. Beyond satellite photos or Google street view drive-bys or realtor photos of the house next door, I want THIS tree to have a moment of acknowledgement for being extraordinary, for growing to a magnificent height, for delivering shade and shelter, for the dappling of light and the whisper of wind through its leaves.

It doesn’t need a moment, but it deserves one.

And the boy loved the tree very much. And the tree was happy.

Shel Silverstein

I mowed over some ground bees today.

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So of course I decided today—right now is the time to start a new blog. I blame a higher-than-is-wise dose of Benadryl. Also, it’s Sunday.

I’m not even sure ground bees is what they’re called to be honest, but their classification seemed really unimportant as I sprinted away from the lawn mower, even less so now as I’m typing and could easily look them up and provide actual, valid information.

That would set a standard for this site I’m not willing to commit to (yet).

But I’ve been wanting to get back into casual writing and since the yard work was halted on account of the insect muggers, here I am.

I won’t tell you to expect thoughts on family, marriage, fatherhood, music, leadership, work, accessibility, baseball, technology, or life. My track record for new blogs has been abysmal in the last twenty years. It’s even money that this will be my only substantive contribution.

Still. I like to think that I’ve reached the level of maturity and discipline (and wisdom and knowledge) to deliver something worth reading on a semi-regular bases. I’ve certainly started proof reading before hitting publish which is a previously unattained level of refinement, so there is hope.

Until later -🦉

P.S. Immense gratitude to my friend and colleague Tyler Hall for the website home.

P.P.S. Since I don’t have footnotes set up here yet, pretend the Sunday reference in paragraph one links here to elaborate with the following:

In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you’ve had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.

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